Music labels spring leaks – for publicity

Indie record companies are using controlled (and sometimes uncontrolled) leaks of new music to generate buzz.

from the March 30, 2007 edition

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The promotions firm Cornerstone, with clients such as Gnarls Barkley and Lily Allen, has an entire department devoted to working with music bloggers and Internet tastemakers. According to copresident Jon Cohen, the firm identifies an artist's existing fans among music bloggers and "empowers" them, as he puts it, by providing them with audio and video content, or tickets and prizes for contests. The firm tracks over 1,600 blogs.

Major labels frequently "watermark" promotional CDs sent to reviewers with a digital signature traceable to the recipient in case of an unauthorized leak. But some smaller labels may even be taking the next step and leaking entire albums themselves.

Kris Gillespie, who manages Domino Records, says leaking wasn't out of the question for his label, the home of the rockers Franz Ferdinand and indie buzzmakers the Arctic Monkeys.

"We were seriously considering leaking tracks," Gillespie says of the latest Franz Ferdinand album, "because the watermarks and copy protection were almost doing too good a job."

Gillespie says he checks peer-to-peer trading sites every day to see if the new Arctic Monkeys album has leaked, "but more out of curiosity than out of vigilance," he notes.

With the formation of this new Internet-industrial complex, the absence of music trading can signal serious problems. "If no one's bothered leaking the album the week before the release date, the fear would be that no one cares," says Brendan Bourke, of the music publicity firm TagTeam. "When you're getting within a few weeks of a release, you want people to start talking about it. It almost behooves you to leak."

The multimillion dollar question, of course, is whether leaks and free singles, for all their publicity payoff, can later hurt an artist's sales. No one can say for sure, but there is one point where the blogger, industry executive, and PR guru agree: In the recording industry, there may well be such a thing as bad publicity.

"A leak is only going to hurt album sales if the album itself is bad," says blogger Greenwald. For the major record labels, who are invested heavily in retail, he notes, the fear is that no one will buy the album. "That happens," he says, "because a lot of the bands are not very good."

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